Building the Boost C++ libraries (http://boost.org/) for QNX is pretty straight forward. The build can be executed as described in the Boost documentation. I have performed the build of Boost 1.42 using QNX 6.4.1 installed in a virtual machine.

But there was a little tweak required to build the Boost.Python library. The problem is that python is located in /usr/qnx641/host/qnx6/x86/usr/bin/python but the required Python include files like Python.h are located in /usr/qnx641/target/qnx6/usr/include/python2.5. This setup is confusing the automatic detection of the include files used in the build process.

This can be fixed by providing the right include path, e.g by adding the following line to the file <boost_src_dir>/project-config.jam:

Sometimes a newer Java6 version must be installed, e.g. to get support of full screen applications. But updates for the Dell Mini 9 are not issued as regular as required to solve this problem. Therefore I have decided to install the required packages by hand using packages compiled for other Ubuntu Hardy powered LPIA systems.Read the rest of this entry »

Using the import statement of Python to load a self build module sometimes fails. In my personal experience most of the time the problem was due to unresolved symbols in my .so modules. For QNX and many other POSIX compatible systems like GNU/Linux Python uses dlopen to load the dynamic libraries aka modules.

While programming in Python I use most of the time the Python perspective provided by the PyDev plug in for Eclipse. PyDev is the abbreviation of Python Development Environment and available from http://pydev.sourceforge.net/index.html. This post outlines the steps installing PyDev and the Python lint pylint.

Using TFPT from Microsoft Team Foundation PowerTools December 2006 with this or a similar command

> TFPT.exe /online

fails with the message

Unable to determine the workspace.

If this is the case for a workspace created with Visual Studio 2008 try to change the workspace from Visual Studio 2005. Even only changing the comment was sufficient in my case. After this change everything works again from TPFT and VS 2008, too.

A useful extension to Eclipse and therefore QNX Momentics is Mylyn (http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/). It helps to organize your actual task in the perfect way. Give it a try!

To install it add for IDE 4.5 (Tau) the Eclipse 3.3 update site to Help->Software Updates->Find and install… . Select the radio button named “Search for new features to install” and click Next. Then it is possible to add a “New Remote Site…”.

For most distributions of Eclipse, there should already be a “Europa Discovery Site” defined in the Update Manager. Otherwise you can add the following URL as a remote update site in the update manager.